Platform/Layout/Printing and fragmentation: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:15, 9 March 2020

This page provides information about our efforts in 2020 to improve the platform parts of printing and fragmentation in Firefox. Given how closely linked the frondend and platform parts of printing are, this will inevitably involve some frontend work too.

Rationale

Support for printing in Firefox has historically been poorly maintained, and is currently in a dismal state compared to other browsers. There are two main areas for improvement:

Printing UX: Firefox’s printing UI/UX lacks consistency and is complicated and confusing compared to the competition. Print settings are displayed differently across operating systems, different methods of accessing printing lead to different dialogs, and print preview is not displayed by default on macOS.
Printing output: There is a significantly-sized backlog of user-reported bugs related to print output (for both printing devices and PDF export). Some of these bugs include cases where printing fails completely, several pages are missing, or the printed layout is just incorrect.

Managing bug lists

The tables of bugs below are managed automatically using the `whiteboard` field in bugzilla.

Add "[print2020]" to add a bug to the printing backlog
Add "[frag2020]" to add a bug to the fragmentation backlog
Add "[print_v{XX}]" to add a bug to the list of printing bugs targetted at Firefox vXX (e.g. "[print_v73]").
Add "[frag_v{XX}]" to add a bug to the list of fragmentation bugs targetted at Firefox vXX (e.g. "[frag_v73]").